At the present, signal degradation can be a significant barrier to customer satisfaction in industries that provide service to customers across an electronic transmission medium. In the satellite television industry and in any broadcasting industry, customers receive program service through a satellite or terrestrial broadcast or across a cable network. Customer-side equipment or components that are used to receive signals or display content sent by a service provider may degrade or fail over time, leading to a loss in signal. In addition to the television industry, signal degradation may occur in other contexts such as the transmission of information across the Internet or other computer-accessible medium (including a local area network, wide-area network, and so on), including Internet protocol television transmissions, a wireless network such as a radio frequency or infrared network, and so on.
Overcoming the problems presented by signal degradation involves two distinct hurdles: first, gathering data on signal quality/strength; and second, identifying customers adversely affected by poor signal quality/strength. Recently, major strides have been made in the first area. For example, at Dish Network approximately one half of the company's 14,000,000 customers possess receivers that automatically send signal strength numbers to a central data base, where they can be reviewed. Embodiments discussed herein are directed to the second hurdle in overcoming signal degradation problems, namely how to identify signal degradation over periods of time that are both short enough to make a timely response to customers' service problems, and long enough to avoid bothering them about temporary outages that will automatically correct themselves.